Roy Billington read this book when he lived in Thornton Heath in 1937.He bought it from a Croydon bookshop that stocked Left Book Club material.

The Club offered one book each month for half a crown.The books were linked to the ideals of the labour party and communist movements.

Roy Billington

Roy remembers joining the 1926 General Strike and later joining the Communist Party:

"They were told by the mine owners their pay was going to be cut and their hours lengthened. They were shut out from work unless they agreed.The TUC (Trades Union Council)called the other unions out on strike to support them.The strike lasted nine days.The trouble was the leadership.The unions caved in but a lot of the members didn't.

When the people went back to work they started imposing all sorts of conditions on the unions and things got worse and worse.Just after the General Strike I became an affiliated member of the Labour Party. I was a socialist and I didn't want to make the capitalist system work, I wanted to change it."

"with the Spanish Civil War going on, more and more people were joining the Communist Party. The Croydon branch kept growing until the outbreak of the war. Then one of the leading members was expelled as a Trotskyist by the central committee of the Communist Party. My wife and I felt the same as the Trotskyists. We disagreed with Stalin's purges of party officials and his clamping down on dissent. We dropped out in 1941 and time has proved how right we were."

Taking Action

Croydon commuters felt the impact of the General Strike in 1926.Public transport was suddenly cut off as most of the transport workers supported the strike.

In the UK three million people joined the General Strike and 2,500 were arrested. At the end of nine days, with no consensus won, the TUC called off the strike. Thousands of miners felt let down by the TUC and Labour Party and joined the Communist Partyinstead.

Find out more

To find out more about the
General strike of 1926
visit the 20th Century London website: